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An NPR blog by Maanvi Singh introduced me to an interesting article about gender equality in the workplace and home. It is by David Pedulla and Sarah Thebaud, faculty members at UT Austin and UC Santa Barbara, respectively. The article is titled "Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint" and published this year in the American Sociological Review.

The authors performed a survey to address the question of how much gender-specific workplace cultures and policies determine the roles that men and women play in their households. Even when couples have gender-equality ideals, workplace constraints may force them to adopt traditional roles of men as the earner and women as the caregiver. The motivation for the study is to understand why the gender revolution has "stalled". More women are in the workforce, but are still highly underrepresented tin top positions. Examples given are that women make up only 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 3% of members of Congress.

If you could design your ideal workplace, what would it look like? If you are reading this blog, chances are that your description includes more than a high salary and state of the art facilities and includes being valued for your ability and treated fairly and respectfully by others.

Recently I served on a visiting committee that privately interviewed every staff and faculty member of an academic department. If I had to design my ideal workplace, I could not have come up with a more satisfied group. Everyone loves their job and feels welcomed and respected. Inclusion, diversity, and excellence are seamlessly interwoven. My ideal workplace would look a lot like that.

During the past two years I was given the gift of time (about 18 months) to study my university in depth to make recommendations for advancing a respectful and caring community. The result is a report currently under discussion by faculty, staff, postdocs, students and alumni. Some of the recommendations, such as universal unconscious bias training, would, I believe, be quite impactful if they spread widely. That particular recommendation is based on groundbreaking work done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Google.

Back to top.4. Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire

From: Joan Schmelz [jschmelz_at_memphis.edu]

By Michelle Goldberg

Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site's front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. "I don't know that I would do it under my real name," she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It's "not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications" of constant, round-the-clock abuse.

Back to top.6. First annual Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium (ERES) will be held May 28 & 29, 2015

From: Lisa Kaltenegger [lkaltenegger_at_astro.cornell.edu]

The first annual Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium (ERES) will be held May 28 & 29, 2015 at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, PA. This is the first in a series of annual symposia to be held in a rotating basis at different universities: Penn State (2015), Cornell (2016), and Yale (2017).

ERES is aimed at early career scientists (graduate students, postdocs, advanced undergraduates) working in all realms of exoplanetary science and related disciplines (e.g. brown dwarfs, protoplanetary disks, star formation, related instrumentation and theory). The conference will give emerging scientists an opportunity to present their work in either a short oral presentation or a poster session and to network with other early career scientists, and special career development experts.

Registration is now open! The registration deadline and deadline for abstract submission is March 26, 2015.

To register, submit an abstract, or find more information about travel and accommodations, please visit eres-symposium.org or email L-ERES-2015-QUESTIONS_at_lists.psu.edu.

It's important not to blame the woman but it is true that women are playing by existing (men's) rules in astronomy and other male-dominated sciences, so it's worth thinking about how our approaches mesh with those rules.

Back to top.8. Now Accepting Applications for the 2015 Blewett Fellowship

From WIPHYS posting for Feb 23, 2015

The Blewett Fellowship enables women to return to physics research careers after having had to interrupt those careers. Applications are due June 1, 2015.